This two-part research project evaluated the effectiveness of interpretive messages at Fossil Butte National Monument in conveying knowledge about the place and its resources and promoting respect for the fossil resource. The first study measured the short and long-term knowledge gains from a trip to the Visitor Center and the influence of a specially designed fossil respect message on the fossil protection beliefs of Monument visitors. The Visitor Center was successful in conveying information about the fossil resource and story of Fossil Lake, and that knowledge was retained for at least several weeks. However, neither the Visitor Center nor the special message, were successful in improving the fossil respect beliefs of respondents. The second study combined a visitor survey with direct observations of visitor behavior to evaluate the effectiveness of interpretive materials along a nature trail in improving the knowledge of ancient Fossil Lake, increasing fossil respect beliefs, and reducing depreciative behaviors. Six different treatments were applied that evaluated an interpretive sign, box of fossils that visitors were invited to touch, and participation in an interactive interpretive program. Only the interpretive program increased knowledge of the Fossil Lake story. None of the trail interpretive materials improved fossil respect beliefs. The sign was somewhat effective in reducing entry into a closed research quarry. While it is generally thought that those most knowledgeable about natural resources will have the higher resource protection beliefs, Fossil Butte visitors who reported being the most interested in fossils had the greatest knowledge of the Fossil Lake story but had the lowest fossil protection beliefs. Therefore, there was some evidence that fossil enthusiasts were the least likely to respect the resource. / Ph. D.

Ecotourism and protected area visitation have been steadily increasing in recent years in Central and South America, inevitably resulting in natural resource impacts. The consequences of such impacts may include natural resource degradation, diminished aesthetic qualities, or decreased functionality of certain facilities like recreation sites and trails. Recreation ecology and visitor impact management expertise and tools are available to help balance the potentially conflicting management goals of protecting natural resources and permitting visitation but such knowledge has not been widely used in Central and South America. The goals of this research were to characterize certain visitor-related natural resource impacts and to determine how these impacts could be assessed and managed in Central and South America. The research included case studies of eight protected areas in Costa Rica and Belize, trail impact assessment research at Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, and development of a new visitor impact assessment and management framework, presented as three papers intended for journal submission. The first paper had two objectives: 1) to identify visitor-related natural resource impacts at selected protected areas in Costa Rica and Belize to increase awareness about visitor impact problems, and 2) to apply and compare rapid trail and recreation site impact assessment procedures to provide study site managers with impact data and impact assessment procedures. A variety of natural resource impacts were reported by interview subjects and recorded by rapid assessment procedures. The management utility of the rapid trail and recreation site impact assessment procedures were compared and discussed and the need for developing additional rapid assessment procedures to evaluate other resource impacts reported by protected area managers was also identified. The intent of the second paper was to investigate trail impacts at Torres del Paine National Park. Study objectives included measuring the frequency and magnitude of selected trail impacts, and comparing the relative impact contribution of the amount of use, vegetation type, trail position and trail grade on common condition indicators such as width and incision. Findings somewhat contradicted those of other studies, revealing that amount of use significantly contributed to trail width and incision. However, findings also indicated that vegetation type and trail grade contributed to number of informal trails and trail incision, respectively. A variety of management strategies were recommended and suggestions were provided for future monitoring studies. The purpose of the third paper was to propose a new visitor impact assessment and management framework that would provide managers with a feasible means of addressing visitor impact management concerns for selected protected areas in Central and South America. The Protected Areas Impact Assessment and Management (PAIAM) framework was adapted from existing frameworks like carrying capacity and the Limits of Acceptable Change to provide a simple, cost-effective and relatively quick decision making process. PAIAM analyzes visitor impacts using an expert panel and incorporates stakeholders and local residents into decision making. This study experimentally applied the new framework in Mexico and compared PAIAM to existing frameworks. The focus of this dissertation is on Central and South America since they are heavily visited ecotourist regions that could potentially benefit from applying recreation ecology and visitor impact expertise and tools to protected area management. This research demonstrated that a variety of visitor impacts are affecting natural resources and visitor facilities like trails and recreation sites at selected protected areas in Central and South America. This research also developed and applied rapid impact assessment procedures and visitor impact frameworks for use in Central and South American protected areas. / Ph. D.

Included in this thesis are two papers describing companion studies which employed complementary methodologies to study the issue of how Acadia National Park might balance resource protection efforts and maintain quality visitor experiences on the summit of Cadillac Mountain. In the first study, stated choice analysis was used to assess visitors' preferences for alternative combinations of public access, resource protection, visitor regulation, and site hardening to manage the Cadillac Mountain summit. Results suggest that visitors consider resource protection to be a priority and are willing to accept regulation of their behavior onsite, reinforced with the use of moderately to highly intensive management structures, but generally don't support limiting public access to the summit to achieve resource protection objectives. In the second study, qualitative interviews were conducted to provide an in-depth understanding of visitor experiences on the summit of Cadillac Mountain and how site management actions designed to achieve resource protection objectives might affect visitors' experiences. Respondents indicated that the summit of Cadillac Mountain is a centerpiece of Acadia National Park, and their experiences of the mountain summit are centered around the aesthetics and naturalness of Cadillac Mountain. Several factors emerged as influencing whether site management actions are deemed appropriate by visitors and perceived to affect visitors' experiences. In particular, site management structures that were perceived to blend in with the surroundings, be constructed of natural materials and protect vegetation were considered appropriate and of little consequence to visitors' experiences. Some study participants also suggested that site management structures that provide visitors with the opportunity to freely demonstrate their choice to help protect vegetation and soils can enhance visitors' experiences. In contrast, site management structures and actions perceived as being regulatory, confining, or limiting opportunities for visitors to choose to help protect vegetation resources were considered less appropriate and more likely to negatively affect visitors' experiences. / Master of Science

No description available.

The objectives of this study were two fold. The first was to quantify the nature and extent of current levels of human impact in alpine areas at four sites within Fiordland and Mount Aspiring National Parks along walking tracks at Key Summit, Gertrude Saddle, Borland Saddle and Sugarloaf Pass. In order to do so, a survey was carried out with transects placed perpendicular to the track, and distributed among different vegetation types. In each transect, plant structural and compositional aspects, and soil and environmental parameters were measured. Transects were divided into track, transition, undisturbed and control zones, and changes to dependent variables were compared with distance from the track centre. Damage from visitor impact was largely restricted to within 1m from the track centre. The most significant impacts were to structural aspects of plant and soil properties with significant reductions in plant height, total vegetation cover and bryophyte cover, and increases in bareground and erosion on tracks. Erosion was more prevalent on slopes greater than 25°, while tracks on peat soils contained greater bareground exposure, particularly of organic soil. The second study objective was to investigate the relationship between specific levels of impact and the resulting damage to two key alpine vegetation types, tussock herb field and cushion bog. This was undertaken by carrying out controlled trampling experiments, measuring changes to plant structural and compositional aspects four weeks and one year after treatment. Both vegetation types saw dramatic reductions in total vegetation cover and height immediately after trampling, however overall composition and species richness varied little. These two alpine vegetation types showed moderate-low resistance to initial impact and low resilience, with very little recovery evident one year later. Research intothese two areas is important for managing visitor use within alpine areas in order to meet conservation and recreation goals. The survey indicates that alpine community types are very sensitive to visitor use, showing significant structural damage, however the spatial extent of impact is limited within the broader landscape. Instead, visitor impacts associated with tracks are likely to be more visually and aesthetically significant, influencing the visitor experience. The trampling experiments indicate that use levels over 25-75 passes per year within tussock herbfield and cushion bog vegetation on peat soils will result in ongoing damage to previously undisturbed sites. Methods for minimising impacts include limiting visitor numbers, public education in low impact practices, redirection of tracks and use to areas that are less sensitive, the dispersal of visitor activity at very low use intensities (less than 75 direct passes per year) and the concentration of activity on tracks above this level.

This study reports the characteristics of home visitor training based on the results of a national survey of nominated best practice home visiting programs that service children with disabilities and their families. Two hundred thirty-six programs were nominated by their state's director of Maternal-Child Health and/or their state's Part H Coordinator as community-based programs that have had success integrating home visiting services into their community's overall system of care for children eligible for Part H services and/or special health care needs. The return rate of the survey was 85%, and these 193 programs serve as the basis for this study. Results include information on topic areas on which home visitors received preservice and inservice training (i.e., atypical child development, community-based services, cultural competence), the amount of training home visitors received (i.e., hours of preservice and inservice training), and how training practices compare to what experts in the field view as recommended practices. The results indicate that the majority of program directors provided their home visitors with preservice and inservice training. The results also suggest that agencies that only employed professional home visitors tended to provide more training than those agencies employing only paraprofessionals. The results of this study indicate that a program's model of service delivery did not predict the amount or type of training home visitors received. The discussion includes recommendations that are offered to directors of home visiting programs.

This thesis is a study that aims to understand the pre, during and post visit behaviours of theme park visitors. This study took place at Janfusun Fancyworld, which is situated at Gukeng village Yun-Lin County, Taiwan. The park was the first Taiwanese theme park to achieve ISO 9002 and has hosted over 2 million visitors every year almost since its inception over a decade ago. By these criteria Janfusun is considered the leading theme park in Taiwan. Theme parks originally emerged from medieval and travelling fairs, but the success of locations such as Coney Island in the late nineteenth century introduced the element of exciting rides. At present the definition of a 'theme park' might be said to be an 'amusement park' that possesses a central theme based on history, fiction or other core. However, it is the researcher's own observation that Janfusun focuses more on the installation of hardware facilities, but pays less attention in creating an unifying theme. This situation may have affected the research outcome since Janfusun operates more as an 'amusement park' from a western perspective but markets itself as a 'theme park' within Taiwan, and is consistent with a Taiwanese understanding of the term of being a 'theme park'. The main hypothesis adopted in this study is that satisfaction may be of two types: (1) generic, which relates to general 'push' needs such as those for relaxation, and (2) site specific, which relate to destination attraction features and 'pull' determinants. This thesis argues that the satisfaction of generic motives such as the requirement for relaxation and escape is contingent upon the ability of the attraction to meet the visit motives specific to the attraction. For example, a need for escape would not be met if a theme park visitor found the rides uninspiring, the portrayal of fantasy unconvincing and the food poor. Furthermore, researchers such as Foster (1999) suggest that some destination attributes, while considered important by the tourists, rarely act as an incentive to choose a specific destination, but the absence of these attributes can be a powerful deterrent. Some of the attributes, such as 'accessible toilets' and 'a place to rest', are considered as convenience factors in this thesis. This thesis attempts to understand the relationship of push, pull and convenience factors to the visitors' overall satisfaction. Also, this thesis tries to understand the role of socio-demographic variables in determining overall satisfaction. This thesis also includes a longitudinal study that allows the research to capture the effect of changes to visitors. For example, Janfusun has newly installed an artificial beach and wave feature that serves the social needs of its visitors. This thesis also examines the importance of repeat visitation in determining visitors' motivations and experiences. For example, it was found that visitors with high repeat visits are more aware of the 'new rides' than the first time visitors. Finally the last chapter attempts to answer two key questions, (a) why are the findings of importance to both conceptual literature and management practice, and (b) what might future researchers learn from this thesis. The objectives of this thesis are thus summarised as to: 1. Conduct a longitudinal study in Janfusun. 2. Identify visitors' pre-visit behaviour, which is associated with generic motives and push factors. 3. Identify visitors' during-visit behaviour, which is associated with site-specific features and pull factors. 4. Identify post-visit behaviour, which is associated with satisfaction and loyalty. 5. Identify the causal relationships between pre, during and post visit behaviours and conceptualise a model. 6. Identify the role of convenience factors.

This study critically examines the role of visitor use information in park management planning. Few park planning documents utilise visitor use information. This is thought to result from two problems. Firstly, visitor use studies have been plagued with methodological problems such as unclear objectives, lack of rigour in the survey design and lack of synthesis of information needs. These have resulted in data which are unreliable and at times have no direct implication for management planning. The second problem arises from the lack of understanding of the role visitor use information may play in the planning process. A case study, the Centennial Park User Survey, was undertaken to demonstrate how the inadequacies of existing visitor use studies could be overcome and to provide a base for future planning of Centennial Park. The survey data have assisted Management both in day-to-day decision making and future management planning relating to control of forthcoming events, responding to public comment, traffic management, facility provision, staff changeover, park staff work programmes and rosters, allocation of financial and staff resources, promotion of the Park, provision of interpretative material and re-allocation of users. By comparing the shortcomings of previous studies with the experience of the case study, specific implications for the collection and use of visitor use information in park management planning have been identified.

Abstract Dark tourism has been recognised as a distinctive tourism phenomenon of the twenty-first century, with increasingly significant numbers of visitors and tourists going to dark tourism attractions and sites, new dark tourism products and attractions emerging, and modern global communication media generating interest in dark tourism attractions, while at the same time affecting the image of destinations. The phenomenon of dark tourism has been examined in academia from the mid-1990s; however, it remains one of the less developed areas of tourism and leisure research. Not surprisingly, knowledge of the experiences of visitors and tourists at dark tourism attractions and sites is both theoretically fragile and limited. In redressing this omission in tourism and leisure research, this study examines the effect of enduring involvement and socio-demographic variables on visitor experiences and benefits gained at a contemporary dark tourism site. The focus of the study is the April 3rd Peace Park on Jeju Island, South Korea, a site commemorating and memorialising one of the most destructive episodes in modern Korean history. In doing so, the study developed a theoretical framework for understanding visitor experiences at dark tourism sites, using a benefits-based approach along with the concept of enduring involvement. This approach provides a framework for comprehending visitors’ dark tourism experiences by identifying reasons for visit, on-site experiences, and benefits gained from these experiences. Enduring involvement is applied to investigate the effect of a visitor’s ‘personal connection’ to the tragic event when it comes to their experiences at the site. The April 3rd Peace Park on Jeju Island commemorates a violent political conflict, which began on April 3rd in 1948, and resulted in 30,000 of the inhabitants dead or missing. The park was inaugurated in 2008 for the purposes of education, commemoration, and reconciliation within the Jeju community, in which the family and relatives of both victims and perpetrators still live. The research employs qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore visitor experiences. In its qualitative component, 46 semi-structured interviews were conducted between September and October 2008 in order to identify reasons for visit, the cognitive and affective on-site experiences of visitors and the benefits gained from their visit. This data was utilised in the construction of a site-specific questionnaire. In the quantitative component, self-administered questionnaires and face-to-face interviews were conducted from June 23 to July 31, 2009. A total of 407 valid questionnaires, out of 450 distributed, were utilised to test 16 hypotheses derived from the theoretical framework. The results indicate that a benefits-based approach was effective in exploring visitors’ dark tourism experiences. With this approach, a sense of obligation or personal duty was identified as one of the key reasons for visiting the site. Emotional experiences were also found to be important, and likely to lead to the visitors’ benefits gained. However, results also indicate a benefits-based approach was not effective for segmentation of visitors. In relation to enduring involvement, visitor experiences and benefits gained from experiencing the site and its history were found to differ significantly based on visitors’ level of enduring involvement. High involvement visitors were more likely to recall actual memories of the April 3rd incident, as opposed to acquiring knowledge of it or related issues at the site itself, in stark contrast with low involvement visitors. These differences in visitor experiences and benefits gained were due therefore to visitors’ prior knowledge of and familiarity with the incident. The results of the study also indicate that high involvement visitors are more likely to be elderly, to reside locally, to be connected to the incident, or to have higher levels of education. Low involvement visitors on the other hand are more likely to be young, non-local, and with generally lower levels of education. The study concludes that an effective way of understanding dark tourism experiences from a theoretical perspective is to apply both a benefits-based approach and the concept of enduring involvement.

People are fascinated with death and disaster. One simply has to watch traffic slow to a crawl when passing a car accident to understand this. However, this fascination goes beyond the side of a highway and enters the realm of tourism. Today, numerous sites of death and disaster attract millions of visitors from all around the world: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne Frank's House, Graceland, Oklahoma City, Gettysburg, Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Arlington National Cemetery. The list grows each year as exhibited by the recent creation of an apartheid museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Due to the increasing popularity of this tourism product, a small number of academics have begun studying the phenomenon. Leading the field are Lennon and Foley who labeled it Dark Tourism, Seaton who coined the term Thanatourism, and Rojek who developed the concept of Black Spots. However, despite ongoing study, there has been a paucity in understanding what actually motivates individuals to sites of dark tourism. Yet understanding motivation is imperative, particularly given the subject and sensitivity of these sites. Some are slowly decaying, and visitors play a large role in their preservation. Subsequently, without proper management, visitor influxes can further deteriorate sites or induce friction with the locals. Knowledge then, also provides administrators the necessary tools to properly manage the varying stakeholders. Although many feel an interest in death and disaster simply stems from morbidity, the range of factors involved extend from an interest in history and heritage to education to remembrance. To begin this study, a list of possible motivations was compiled. Then, to get a better comprehension of these motivations, visitors to the Holocaust Museum Houston were surveyed as a case study. As a commodified, synthetic site of death and atrocity, the museum fits the definitions of a dark tourism site as established by lead academics. Therefore, by asking visitors to the museum what motivated them to the site, the results will hopefully give some acumen into the wants and needs of certain stakeholders. Finally, this research sought to discover if motivation at the museum could shed light on motivation to other sites of dark tourism.